You Do Not Flee a Storm

or: morale as a terrain of struggle

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You Do Not Flee a Storm

Last night was the coldest night of my dog’s life. He didn’t know it, of course. I no longer live outside, and I’ve got central heat, so he was curled up on the bed with his chin on my leg instead of huddling near the heater like he would have had to do if he’d been born a bit earlier in my life.

He didn’t know that I was worried about the feral cats, the ones I built a little shelter for in my tiny falling down barn at the back of my property. He only knows that he thinks he wants to go outside until he gets outside and realizes he doesn’t want to be outside quite as much as he thought he did.

There’s one house visible from my house, on the other side of some trees, and Rintrah noticed a plow in my neighbors driveway and decided to let me know. I ran out into the snow and waved the guy down and paid him to clear mine too.

That second part, the part about the plow, that isn’t really part of the metaphor I’m trying to build. I’m just grateful that my dog told me about the plow. And when you live alone in the countryside, what counts as “excitement” is recalibrated dramatically.

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Most people who died in a medieval battle, as I understand it, died during the rout. When soldiers break rank with one another and flee, enemies ride them down with cavalry to capture, maim, and kill. This is one of the primary roles of cavalry, in fact—to run down the defenseless enemy.

Most movies show medieval war all wrong. It’s rarely a series of one-on-one fights. We are stronger when we stand together than we are when we’re isolated, and the tactics and weaponry of warfare were developed with that in mind. It’s the same reason the average soldier does not carry a handgun—one-on-one combat simply isn’t a reasonable plan for most people in most situations. We fight in units. We defend one another. And we do not flee.

I learned this the hard way in my time as a frontline protestor. The cops come in, marching in unison, clacking their batons on their shields, throwing their weight around. They fire flashbangs and tear gas and baton rounds. They don’t do it to hurt us—though they sure don’t mind when they do. They do it to terrify us. They do it to cause a rout, which ends the protest and lets them pick people off unhindered.

Soon after I started going to protests, I learned the single most useful thing you can do for a crowd is keep them calm. It’s oddly easy. Just yell “walk!” or “don’t run!” (people like to argue about which is better. I’m not going to herein.) Yell this quickly enough, get enough people yelling it, and you’ve stopped a rout. The police will have failed at their purpose, which is to control us through fear.

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It was the coldest night my dog has ever seen, and my friend in New Orleans sent me videos of dogs playing happily in the snow there. Elected officials in this country are posting videos of snow in Florida to prove to their constituents that global warming is a hoax, even though recordbreaking cold and snow is exactly the kind of climate chaos promised to us by scientists.

My favorite bit of slang I’ve picked up recently is the phrase “we’re so cooked.” I like it because it’s true.

But that doesn’t mean we should break ranks and run. That’s when they mow us down.

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I spent an awful lot of Sunday and Monday doomscrolling, even though I promised myself I wasn’t going to. I also spent a lot of it talking to friends. A friend in Canada who woke up from a nightmare about US invasion. Friends in red states unsure how they will get out. Friends in blue states realizing that local politics are likely to only slow down, not stop, the rise of fascism. Jewish friends watching the world’s richest man emphatically sieg heil to thunderous applause while every news organization in the country warns us that we shouldn’t believe the evidence of our own eyes.

Myself and an awful lot of my friends woke up Tuesday to the news that our identities are illegal. Trans prisoners are being forced to detransition and women are about to be moved into men’s prisons. The crackdown on migrants is already ramping up.

I know you know all of this. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s cold outside. You can see the snow.

Maybe your house, like mine, has central heating. Not everyone’s does. Not everyone has a house at all—in fact, fewer and fewer of us do. And honestly? My metaphor about the cold doesn’t really work here, because when we’re talking about literal cold, then sure I have a house and a furnace. But as for the rise of fascism in this country, I’m a publicly visible trans anarchist.

But to continue my convoluted metaphors, you do not flee from a storm, you take shelter, and you help others take shelter. You get people away from out in the open. You also fight back. Okay, not against storms. Again, this is the problem with metaphors. But fascism? That you fight back against.

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Nothing that is happening really comes as any kind of shock. Not the sieg heiling, not the executive orders, not the world’s billionaires lining up to bend the knee to fascism, not the rise of the populist Right. We’ve known it was coming, the storm has been rumbling in the hills for years.

Maybe you’ve been preparing for it, by building community, getting to know your neighbors, connecting with mutual aid organizations, preparing for disaster, keeping your passports in order, or working with affinity groups and/or larger organization frameworks to confront fascists directly and indirectly where you live.

Maybe you haven’t done those things yet. That’s okay. There’s this cliche in preparedness circles: “the best time to get prepared was yesterday. The second-best time is today.”

A lot of people are going to be offering lists of solutions, of simple things you can do today. These lists are good. I’ve written some before, and I’ll likely write one again. Just now, though, I want to revel in the snow with my dog and I want to talk through plans with my loved ones. Maybe that’s the start of my list.

It’s okay to be worried. Fear is a natural response to dangerous stimuli. The trick is that we can’t let it control us. We ought to acknowledge the danger and take it into consideration when we make our plans, but fear itself usually tells us to do exactly what we ought not do. Fear tells us to run from the enemy. Fear tells us to panic and flee. Instead, we organize.

At some point, we might need to retreat. Retreat is a reasonable and important part of strategy and tactics. To break ranks and flee uncontrollably, though, is presumably never the answer.

Morale itself is a terrain of struggle. Our morale is under attack, because our lives are under attack. But they haven’t defeated us, and they won’t.

So play with your dog, and talk to your friends, and make plans. And whatever you do, don’t let fear defeat you.